


The Puffs

by buddenbrooks



Category: Block B
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 19:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6821908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buddenbrooks/pseuds/buddenbrooks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Going to space isn't what Kyung thought it would be. The most exciting thing that's happened in two years is Captain Woo Jiho sobbing in a pile of his (and Kyung's) unwashed pants.</p><p>Alternate title: A Little Less Dirty Underwear, A Little More Kiss Me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Puffs

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Do you like star trek? What about some sort of space travel au with Zikyung cooped up on a spaceship with a fair amount of tang, way too much denial over their feelings, and frankly too few pairs of underwear? I love Zikyung as that couple that doesn't realize/admit to anyone that they're into each other (but everyone else just rolls their eyes because "how ridiculous can they be") Not (necessarily) angsty, but some alien-attack-forces-them-to-confront-how-they-really-feel action is always good!"
> 
> Spoiler: I don't watch Star Trek and 99% of the science stuff in this is bullshit.

Going to space isn’t what Kyung thought it was going to be.

That he can even process a thought like that makes him beyond privileged, he understands. Not amongst his peer group - he’d sweated and starved and flagellated those grades out. The triangular foam seating of the _Supernova_ , up at the front of the ship before the sprawling glass viewscreen, had been in his sights since he’d watched the rockets go up with sweating chubby hands and wide five year old eyes. All the crew trace their fascination with the skies back to then: watching the images stutter across their televisions of the first humans to touch down on a foreign world for decades. Humanity was back in the space race.

It only escalated from there. Kyung was starting secondary school when ships went outside the solar system; he rushed home from his final high school exams to see the first images lit by another sun. He entered cosmonaut training as news came back of life on other planets: stringy wormlike creatures crawling over volcanic, spewing vents; shimmering leggy beetles roaming across endless ice fields; drifting, glittering, eerie clouds of gas nicknamed ‘the puffs’, which every observer had agreed to be sentient, for reasons they couldn’t quite explain. It’s breathtaking and mind-boggling and something completely, totally new. Travelling out here guarantees you a place in the history books, like the first explorers of Everest, or the Poles, or those very first pioneers to our own humble moon. Kyung won his place here through dedication.

No, it’s compared to his ancestors that he’s privileged. His mother had wept desperately into his collar before their ship took off. There was every chance he would never see her again. Accidents always could happen. Warp drives are tricky things to manage; the only thing more frightening to Kyung than staying stuck to the earth for the rest of his life is returning to it far into the future, to find a civilization beyond recognition. That wasn’t why she was crying, though. She’d been his age when the first moon landings happened. Progress, especially at this apt lightspeed, is humbling and terrifying like nothing else. Kyung’s grandparents hadn’t even owned a television on which to view those landings. His great grandparents had worked the fields their whole lives, only looking to the skies for a vague forecast of the weather.

And here Kyung is, lightyears from earth, and instead of drinking in the endless voids passing by, or gazing into the swarm of nearby constellations, he’s digging under Jiho’s bed for a fresh pair of underwear.

“Did you ever think,” he says to Yukwon, “that being an astronaut might be more glamorous than this?”

Yukwon, in a grubby tank top and board shorts (only Yukwon would bring board shorts on a space mission) is hanging off the side of his bunk, engaged in upside down sit ups with a lot of unnecessary grunting. “Too much teevee,” he says. “ _Fifty one_. You should have figured that out - _fifty two_ \- when they showed us how to recycle our piss.”

Kyung shudders. That’s something he still likes to pretend not to know about. In this cramped space it’s a lot easier to pretend not to know certain things. That you don’t hear the heavy breathing in the bunk across from you. That you don’t see Yukwon holed up in the engine room with his eyes all puffy, staring at old photographs. That you don’t smell whatever it is Jiho’s got stashed under his bed.

Socks, as it turns out, and underwear, but a depressing lack of anything clean. Kyung hauls out a pile of it - almost as high as his own crouched figure - and sighs. “I just thought as Flight Lieutenant I’d be doing something a bit more exciting. Plotting courses. Organising missions. Not trying to find one pair of pants without skidmarks.”

“ _Fifty three_. Under Jiho’s bed is a darker place than deep space,” Yukwon says. Kyung touches something cold and sticky, and it’s definitely not an alien life form.

To be fair, they’d taught them this back in the Academy. Half the training they got wasn’t about physics and how to mend a spaceship. It was emergency training, and not the kind that involved alien attacks. The course was plotted before they left - of course; as if anyone would let a multi million pound spacecraft shoot off without some idea of where it was going. It’s programmed into the ship’s computer, which feeds it to the drive, which pilots the ship. The crew don’t drive the ship; it just carries them to their destination.

It’s more like a safari than anything else. Their primary job is to collect facts when they get to wherever they’re going. Much of their training is just about how to not go completely insane when the ship’s only a little bigger than an average studio apartment, there’s seven people with various smells and bad habits and annoying quirks, and there is absolutely nowhere else they can go without having all the air in their body depressurise and pop their brain like one of Taeil’s back zits.

Kyung does some deep breathing exercises, but Jiho’s dirty clothes are too close for it to help. He wishes some of their training had focused around how to do your own laundry. Or maybe they just expected them to already know. They underestimated Jiho. Sure, he’s a prodigy - Kyung knows that better than anyone. It had been Jiho’s chubby hand he’d been clutching when the rockets went up; Jiho he ran behind to watch those first broadcasts back from Alpha B11; Jiho at his side, exchanging tense-jawed grins on their first day at the Academy. It had been Jiho, too, who’d forced Kyung to reorientate his sights to the Flight Lieutenant’s (no less comfortable, but less in the central position) seat, because with Jiho there he didn’t have a shot at the captaincy. And that was fine with him, really. They’d been friends too long for Kyung to be bothered by it any more. Jiho is just good at everything he tries. It runs in the family; his older brother Taewoon had flown out two years before, captain of the _Celerity_.

Jiho’s good at everything he tries, but he never tries simple, every day tasks. He never had to; his mother had done it, giving him room to explore his endless talents. But in space, there are no mothers. In space, there are only tiny cramped spaces and seven people who have to somehow get along. Maybe Jiho thinks he’s absolved of laundry duties because of his position of authority. Kyung has no idea where he got that shitty idea. As Flight Lieutenant, it’s his job to relieve him of it.

“Why the fuck are you looking under Jiho’s bed for pants, anyway?” Yukwon’s done with his obnoxious sit ups. He’s just hanging upside down now, blood sagging around his eyes. Kyung entertains himself by imagining what would happen if they had the anti-gravity drill right now. “Why don’t you just wear yours?”

“Because,” Kyung says, steeling his nerves and gathering the filthy pile into his arms, “Jiho already did.”

Jiho’s in the control room where he always is. He doesn’t need to be there; his duties as captain are as postponed as Kyung’s. It’s a shame, really. When he’s using his skills, in his element, Jiho takes on this incredible glow, becomes almost otherworldly himself. He looks like he belongs out here, among wild dark skies and sweeping galaxies. He makes Kyung really believe what sentimental scientists like to say: that we are all made of stardust.

When Jiho has nothing to do, however, he becomes a limp, flabby sort of noodle who whines a lot, itches around everyone like he’s a scab trying to dig himself out of their skin, and wears other people’s underwear without asking because he doesn’t know how to do laundry. He’s collapsed in the Captain’s chair, as much as he can collapse on a triangular piece of foam. His big limbs are thrown off at careless angles, and he’s watching the bleep and murmur of lights on the console with half-lidded eyes and a vacant mouth.

Kyung throws down the pile next to him. Sticky, like he’s been bathing in Taeil’s effort of a pasta sauce (he never adds quite enough reclaimed piss into it) Jiho turns his head. “What?”

“Where’s the laundry machine?”

“What?”

“The laundry machine, _Captain Woo_. Where we wash our clothes. Where is it?”

Jiho shrugs, huffs, and turns back to the console. “You don’t know?”

It would be childish, not to mention dangerous, to start throwing dirty underwear around the console, so Kyung restrains himself for the moment. “I know perfectly well where it is, Jiho. I’ve known where it is since we got our first tour of this ship. I know where it is because in the last two years I’ve been visiting it regularly. About twice as regularly as I should have to, might I add. I want to know if you know where it is. Because, as Jihoon’s magic eight ball likes to say, all signs point to no.”

Jihoon’s magic eight ball had also told them they could expect an alien invasion before the year was out. That’s beside the point.

“You think that’s important right now?” Somehow Jiho manages to slump lower without completely exiting the chair. Clearly, despite his yawning boredom, he’s working his core muscles enough to keep him upright, so Kyung doesn’t feel too guilty about throwing the first pair of pants at his friend’s head.

“Well, as the one currently lacking clean underwear, and having just unearthed the majority of it from under the stinking pit you pass off as a bed, yes. I do think it’s important. I might be second in command here, Jiho, but I am not your valet.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

The dirty socks slips from Kyung’s hand. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I know, I’m a huge pain to be around. Two years, you must be so sick of me already.” Coming from the crumpled in cavity of his chest, Jiho’s voice is tiny, crunched up like the plastic cup in that demonstration of the pressure surrounding them. All the life and Jiho-ness sucked out of it by the crushing weight of everything around. As Kyung watches with his jaw dangling, Jiho slides right off his seat and pitches to the floor. He curls into the pile of filthy underwear and begins to sob.

 

Two hours, three very sloppy cuddles, one well-meaning cup of tea and a few experimental slaps later, Kyung calls an emergency meeting. Their captain remains sobbing in a pile of his (and Kyung’s) unwashed underwear, and while they might not need him to pilot the ship right now, Jiho is still their leader. He has important daily duties: signing off the checks they make; attending to the warp drive and making sure it’s happy and comfortable; deciding what reruns they’re going to watch that night.

Most importantly, Kyung really needs to get that underwear washed.

“I could try slapping him again,” Jaehyo suggests. Kyung glares at him. He’s not entirely sure the slapping was necessary. It only seemed to make Jiho cry harder.

“We could give him some Tang,” Taeil says.

“You’re just trying to get rid of the Tang.”

“Well, we’ve still got two whole crates of it.”

“As the ship’s cook, I’m inclined to think that was your fault in the first place.”

“I can’t think of anything more depressing right now than drinking another can of Tang.” Yukwon, crouched by the prone body of their captain, prods at his shoulder with two fingers. Jiho lets out a fresh howl and snuffles into a pair of heart-patterned boxer briefs. “They mentioned something like this during training. Space sickness, remember?”

Kyung remembers. It was something they’d mentioned in passing; anyone capable of passing the Academy’s mental and emotional fitness tests was supposed to be well out of the reach of that crushing existential despair which some people would succumb to upon comparing the smallness of themselves to the vastness of space. It could still happen, in a rare handful of cases, but they were two and a bit years into their voyage. Jiho hadn’t shown any signs of it before. In fact, Kyung thinks, prior to this outburst Jiho could have done with comparing himself a bit more to the vastness of space. The vastness of space is the only thing capable of dwarfing his ego.

“I don’t think that’s it. The symptoms are different. Lethargy, staring into space, lots of weighty philosophical bullshit about the loneliness of the wandering human spirit.” He comes to Yukwon’s side and crouches down as well, takes in Jiho’s piteous, swollen eyes and soggy mouth. “This is just - crying. Just lots of crying.”

“Why don’t we just ask him?” Jihoon says, and even though they all roll their eyes - as they inevitably do, their engineer being, by tradition, the one to never provide useful solutions - he gets up and joins the kneeling group. A snot bubble blows out of Jiho’s nose. “Jiho? Captain - what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

It takes him a few gulps before he can answer, his voice all shivery and damp from his own personal rainstorm. “Be - because - you all - think - I’m a - bad - captain,” he says. “Be - cause - I didn’t - do - my laund - laundry.”

Kyung’s been through enough stupid emotional moments with Jiho that it’s a deeply learned instinct to give him a slap on the shoulder and scoff. “Don’t be an idiot. That’s not what I said.”

“You - don’t - want me - to be - captain,” Jiho moans, and rolls over to bury his face in Kyung’s favourite checkerboard pants. “You - don’t like - me.”

“I never said any of that,” Kyung asserts to Yukwon’s raised eyebrows. “I just asked him to wash his fucking underwear.”

“And your underwear,” Yukwon reminds him.

“Our underwear, whatever. I didn’t say I didn’t want him to be captain!”

“You’ve never said anything that would make him think that?”

“Why would I? We’re friends! We’ve been in this together the whole time, since we were kids!” Yukwon’s sceptical gaze prickles at Kyung’s conscience. Okay, maybe he’s had a few bad thoughts here and there - a little jealousy, a little frustration - but who wouldn’t, with a friend like Jiho? It’s far in the past. He’s never expressed it, he’d never be that cruel. Gripping Jiho’s shoulders, he tries to roll him over and look him in the face, although Jiho keeps his eyes firmly covered by his hand and a pink polka dot sock which doesn’t belong to either of them, now Kyung thinks about it. “Jiho. Hey, listen, I’ve never said anything like that to you. You’re my best friend, you know that right? I wouldn’t go to space with anyone except you, even if you do make me do your washing all the time.”

The wail Jiho lets out blows Kyung’s hair back off his forehead and makes him realise Jiho’s been in this state for a lot longer than they realise. He doesn’t seem to have brushed his teeth since last night’s meal of reclaimed piss and dehydrated soy chicken granules.

Leaving Jihoon behind to provide something to cling to, the rest of the crew retreat to the dorm room. The constant snivelling is begin to grate on their nerves. “Great. Now what do we do?”

Jaehyo’s got his tablet out, swiping through the clinical diagnostic manual for space-induced mental illness. “He seemed fine at dinner last night, right? And no one’s seen him since?”

“Right. First time I saw him was when I went in just then.” Kyung looks over to Jiho’s abandoned bed: thin sheets sprawling across the floor; a few stray pairs of socks shed from the pile. In the excavated cavity under Jiho’s bed is the shiny pink cover of a skin mag. Jaehyo’s fingers skate across the screen in frenzied silence for a few more minutes. Then he lets out a loud, disgusted noise and throws himself back against his own pillows.

“I got nothing. He doesn’t have any history of this sort of behaviour, and there’s nothing in here about illnesses just coming on without warning. I mean, maybe if I thought he’d been hiding something but it’s not like there’s anywhere round here to hide anything.” Intentionally or not, Jaehyo’s eyes cut across the room to Yukwon, who goes dark red and tucks something back in his pocket.

“What did he do last night before he went to bed? That might give us some idea.”

“The usual.” Kyung counts off the duties on his fingers. “Went over the nightly checks. Signed off the checklists. Approved today’s co-ordinates. Looked after the warp drive. Shower, shit, bed.”

“So unless he found something incredibly upsetting in the toilet,” Yukwon says, “it’s probably something to do with the warp drive.”

“Oh _no_.”

 

This might be another small reason why Kyung felt okay giving up the captain’s chair. The captain has to spend a fair amount of time looking over the warp drive, and the warp drive is - there’s really no other word for it - freaky. Understandably so, being as it’s something that shouldn’t really exist, held precariously in a continuum case and swimming in a broth of emotion soup (and that’s the layman’s term; explaining it in scientific terms takes several hours, a number of diagrams and occasionally mind altering substances). It hovers there in its home, roundish (but not really round) and purplish (but not really purple) and forever like something they absolutely should not be viewing with their all too human eyes.

“Don’t you always feel like it’s looking at you?” Kyung shudders.

“Well, it sort of is,” Minhyuk points out. “It’s sort of looking at everything.”

It’s Minhyuk, as the ship’s bridge, who has the closest affinity with what he terms the soul of the ship. While the rest of them repress their feelings and forget about home, it’s Minhyuk’s job to stay as sensitive and nostalgic for their home planet as possible. People like him aren’t trained as cosmonauts, not beyond the necessary emergency protocols. They’re trained as empaths, there to provide a constant source of nutritious human emotion to the heart of the ship. A ship without a bridge will turn rogue, leaching off its crew and sending them into emotional insanity; it’ll plot its own courses, monopolise the controls. A warp drive without a bridge is a murderous monster, flying the ship into the centre of stars without a thought for the people on board. Minhyuk is the homing device, the stabiliser. In some way, he is the drive. They don’t notice him much around the ship, but by God they’d notice if he wasn’t there.

As he steps closer the drive bobs back and forth, dipping in more than three dimensions. Kyung’s head hurts watching it. “So how do we do this?” He was supposed to stay and watch Jiho in his duties once, so he could learn first hand. He’d skittered away though, as soon as he got within range of the glowing purple orb. It unsettles everything he’s packed away in the pit of his stomach. Even Jaehyo - a simple man by all accounts - is lurking in the doorway, distinctly green in the face.

“You look into it,” Minhyuk says, which is exactly what Kyung doesn’t want to do. “It’ll know what you want.”

Minhyuk must have taken a special course in sounding ominous. Gulping back the little bit of regurgitated reclaimed piss and cornflakes which creeps into his throat, Kyung steps forward. The orb swings in some invisible harness and hums a darker not-purple. When he glances back, Minhyuk’s just standing there with his eyes level on the drive. Like he’s warning it to behave.

“Uh. Hi, warp drive,” Kyung says.

“You don’t have to talk to it.”

“Don’t I?”

“It’s made of pure mind. It can hear your thoughts. It can probably taste them.” Then Kyung hopes it’s given Minhyuk the message to stop being such a creepy fuck. He tries to relax, even though all his organs are squirming. The orb shifts from side to side, opens up infinity in its centre, then goes opaque like a long solid note. Perhaps this is its way of communicating.

Then the walls of the drive room drop away; Minhyuk drops away; the continuum cage drops away, and it’s just Kyung and the warp drive, suspended in absolute nothingness with time stretching out on all sides. Even his body has gone, he knows this without looking. Even his brain. It’s just Kyung, pure Kyung, and the drive, and it pools open in a dark difficult colour and swallows him up.

He wakes up easily, sliding his eyes open like he’s just had the best sleep. The continuing existence of the ship, his crewmates and his own hands strikes him as peculiar but quite fortunate. The warp drive hums and winks at him.

“Are you alright?” Minhyuk says. Kyung makes a noise that isn’t quite words. “Just take your time. You were gone a while.”

“What? Did something happen?” Jaehyo pipes from the door. Kyung checks himself from the toes upwards. Legs, knees, bits, stomach, chest, head, arms. All present and correct. “I didn’t see anything happen,” Jaehyo continues petulantly, clearly feeling that he’s missed out. Minhyuk steps forward as the orb retracts back into itself, curls a hand around Kyung’s elbow.

“You know what’s going on?”

“For a second there, I knew everything.” That’s when it really hits him, and Kyung finds himself swaying on the spot and laughing in a ragged sort of way and then he belches and throws up on Minhyuk’s shoes.

“It’s alright,” Minhyuk says once they’ve cleaned up. “It’s always like that the first time. I’m just amazed you’ve got this far in this career without ever looking into the drive.”

“I left it to Jiho. He’s the captain. I never really needed to - and besides.” Kyung doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to; Minhyuk knows first hand how it is. How it feels like everything in your chest has been swept up and tidied into new places. How you recall things which you’d forgotten, which you’d forced yourself to forget, which you’d forgotten subconsciously because you could never have lived remembering it. How dizzying it is to see into every corner of time and every direction all at the same time. How, when you come back to yourself, you feel like your skull - your brain, even - is a glass jar placed delicately over your mind to protect it, and you’ll never again be so unaware of how fragile it is.

“Speaking of Jiho.”

Of course. Kyung knew they were forgetting something. “The puffs,” he says, and understands how stupid he must have seemed to Minhyuk as Jaehyo gawks at him.

“Oh _shit_ ,” Minhyuk says. “The puffs.”

They race back to the console room, where Jihoon has been almost entirely absorbed by Jiho’s wrangling, sobbing body. Fingers jittering against the controls, Jaehyo pulls up sensor data, which logs movement for any sentient being in any part of the ship. The smallest imbalance can affect the mood of the drive - something as small as a mouse, or a bug, or -

“I guess they really are sentient.” They watch on the console as the cloud of gas - greenish-reddish, the sort of glow which surrounds coloured fairylights, insubstantial and deceptively comforting - drifts through the captain’s private bathroom.

“They’ve been waiting to do this for a while,” Kyung says. With the nausea receeded, he’s finding ways to express in human language everything the drive had shown him. “Following the ship, waiting for their chance. I think they came up through the waste chute. It’s the only part of the ship which opens to the outside.”

“Thank God we recycle all our piss,” Taeil breathes.

The puffs, Kyung explains, aren’t alien creatures at all. Warp drives are unstable things. Not every space voyage has been successful. “When the ship crashes, or blows up or whatever, the warp drive comes loose. It can’t be destroyed, after all, it’s like - pure thought. It has the best chance of surviving if it splinters. Then the splinters drift around in space, trying to rejoin a complete consciousness.”

“I guess they thought the captain would be the best target,” Minhyuk says. He’s still watching the console, replaying the footage of the gas drifting around Jiho’s bathroom. None of them have played forward to see how it got into him. That’s something they probably don’t need to know.

“Why is it making him so miserable, then?”

“Because they’re lost.” Kyung moves away from the console, heads over to where Jiho’s got his head buried in Jihoon’s stomach. He’s cried so much his skin’s starting to wrinkle, and it’s not stopping. Hunched over, his shoulders in the blue uniform jacket shuddering, he looks the furthest thing from their ebullient, confident leader, who strode onboard that first day of their journey with his eyes glowing. He looks like the five year old Kyung first met, taking home art projects and ace grades to a father who never really cared. He looks like the thirteen year old who sobbed onto Kyung’s shoulder when he returned to a house less one parent, and a mother in tears. “They’re lost and they want to get home.”

He reaches out for Jiho’s hands. Without a halt in his hacking sobs, Jiho transfers his body weight from Jihoon to Kyung, and Kyung sinks back against the soft, stinking pile of their dirty underwear. He wants nothing more than to return to the warp drive and somehow bring Jiho into that ultimate, all-knowing picture; to spread his mind open for Jiho to read, so he can see - more than see, know, beyond any doubt, that he’s already home. As long as Kyung’s there, he can’t ever be lost.

Instead, Jiho just cries louder. Screws his hands into the front of Kyung’s shirt and soaks him with his tears.

“So what can we do?” Yukwon’s looking at Minhyuk - everyone is, to the one who’s supposed to keep everything stable. And Minhyuk, he pauses the camera footage and heaves a sigh, and turns and looks at Kyung. And Kyung recalls the yawning purplish void, the way it wound itself into every forgotten trail of his mind, and he knows what he has to do.

Jiho’s mouth is sloppy, soaked and shapeless from crying. Kyung kisses it anyway, without a grimace or cringe in his body. It has to be honest; it has to be an expression of everything he feels, all the love he’s ever held for his stupid, messy, brilliant best friend who dragged him beyond the stars and then refused to wash his own underwear. The mingled smell of their bodies surrounds them; the crew hold their breath. Jiho’s tears leak onto Kyung’s face, his wet top lip slimy under Kyung’s nose. He breathes and kisses Jiho and remembers everything they did together, everything they’ve planned to do, and how Jiho could never - never, ever, not in a million lightyears - be anywhere else but home when he’s surrounded by people who need him so very much.

He only moves away when the deluge begins to still. Jiho’s red-rimmed eyes stare back at him, an inch away and full of empty space. Something clogs at the back of Kyung’s throat, and he coughs it up. It’s a puff, a small one, round and glutted with the sense of belonging it needed. It hovers above Kyung’s lips for a second, white and unsure. Then, like the shadowy image which remains after staring at a bright light, it fades to nothing.

“Is it gone?” Jihoon says, appearing from beneath a shroud of laundry.

“Is he okay?” Jaehyo asks, peering between his fingers.

“Did you just _kiss me?_ ” Jiho splutters, and then pants and socks go flying around the console room as Jiho explodes back onto his feet.

The resulting bewildered rampage takes a few hours to subside, during which Kyung takes the chance to throw his laundry into the machine at long last. Eventually, with the help of some of Yukwon’s tranq capsules dissolved in a can of Tang, they get Jiho settled down in his bunk. Jaehyo rigs up an HD sensor next to the toilet, in case there’s any more puffs floating around out there, and after some of Taeil’s best reclaimed piss and powdered cheese sauce with wheat noodles, they retire to bed.

“Have you ever thought,” Yukwon says into the darkness, as Taeil shifts in his sleep and Jaehyo snores into the pillow, “that you might be as essential to our mission as Minhyuk?”

Kyung wants to reply with something snarky. He never wanted to feel like he only got here because he was Jiho’s friend - because he, and probably everyone who mentored them, knew that Jiho wouldn’t survive without Kyung shadowing him. It’s always been that way, ever since they were kids. It’s why Kyung could watch Jiho always one step ahead of him and never really feel overshadowed. Kyung wants to believe he got here because of his own merits, because this team needs him the same way they need Taeil’s skills with reclaimed piss and dehydrated vegetables, or Jaehyo’s technological knowhow, or Yukwon’s medical training.

Really though, if the warp drive had shown him anything, it had shown him the real meaning of his job. The flight lieutenant isn’t there in case the captain dies, or falls ill, after all. He’s there to look after the things the captain doesn’t pay attention to. Like laundry, or his own emotional state. He’s there - like Minhyuk is for the drive - to provide stability. Space is a large, lonely place, after all. There are no mothers here. The one who everyone depends on needs someone to depend on himself.

“I think,” he says back, after a long pause during which he turns onto his side to watch the galaxies sliding past in the distant blackness, “I’m as essential to Jiho.” Wherever they were - in space, at school, on an island far away from everything, the situation would be the same. They might progress beyond all imagining, Kyung thinks, but after all, not that much has changed.


End file.
